Gandhi Wants To Shift India Onto Fast Track Of High Tech

October 20, 1985|By Mark Fineman, Special to The Tribune.

NEW DELHI — Near a downtown street choked with rickshaws, camel carts, garbage heaps and meandering cattle, a team of Indian scientists is working overtime developing new strains of nucleotides, DNA molecules and human enzymes for genetic engineering.

A few hundred miles north, in the Himalayan foothills where Buddhist lamas still walk barefoot, a state-of-the-art silicon factory is about to begin mass production of photovoltaic solar cells in such quantities that it will make India the largest single producer and consumer of solar energy in the world by the end of 1986.

And to the south, in the ultramodern Indian city of Bangalore, Indian scientists are huddled around Asia`s largest optical telescope, monitoring the progress of Halley`s comet. Others are testing Indian-made supersonic jets in an Indian-built wind tunnel, and still others are bent over digital readouts and computer terminals monitoring India`s INSAT weather and communications satellite.

It is all part of what Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi hopes will be a technological revolution in this ancient nation where, still, less than a third of the population can read or write and nearly half live below the poverty line.

Gandhi has said dozens of times in his first year in office that India can overcome its lingering poverty only by modernizing. And in doing so, it must not simply match the technological achievements of other nations but must surpass them.

In a particularly vicious attack on past Indian research, Gandhi recently said, ``What we are going to do is stop rubbishy scientific research which does not give us results. . . . What we want to do is develop research in directions that will put India not just with the advanced countries, but ahead of the advanced countries in certain areas.``

Gandhi also sharply criticized India`s largely government-run industry. He described the nation`s industrial development as ``pathetic,`` adding,

``India cannot be held ransom to such industry. When industry becomes inefficient, when industry starts costing the country . . . ultimately it is the poorest person who pays for it.``

At the heart of Gandhi`s anger was what other Indian scientists have called ``our tendency to reinvent the wheel``--to spend millions of dollars designing and building a product that ultimately is inferior to a similar product already mass-produced and marketed by other countries.

At the time of its independence 38 years ago, India was almost totally agrarian. ``We missed the industrial revolution,`` Gandhi said. ``We had to import everything.``

But in the 1960s, when India suffered a dire foreign-exchange crisis, imports were halted, and India began a national effort toward self-sufficiency that led, ultimately, to mindless duplication rather than creative invention in technology.

It also led to poor quality control, inferior production and a maze of bureaucratic red tape that made India one of the most frustrating countries in the world for scientists and business executives. Some foreign business analysts and scientists say India`s self-sufficiency campaign left behind a foundation so weak it may not be able to handle Gandhi`s high-tech hopes.

For instance, India`s telephone system simply doesn`t work. Earlier this year Gandhi himself quipped that he had to dial an average of 12 times before he got through to a local number. Nearly two-thirds of the 6 million long-distance calls booked in India last year never were connected and, in India`s four major cities alone, nearly 1 million people still are waiting for telephone installation.

``Having computers is fine, but if the phones don`t work, the most sophisticated machine in the world is useless,`` said a senior official of the Indian government`s domestic airline. The airline was the target of the nation`s first computer riot earlier this year when angry passengers went on a rampage at the Bombay airport after a telephone failure blanked out the reservations system.

S. Varadarajan, head of the government`s Council on Scientific and Industrial Research, conceded that much of Indian technology to date has been repetitive and, in some cases, inferior. But under Gandhi`s push for progress in Indian high technology, he added, it has been changing fast.

``We have made a great start,`` Varadarajan said. ``If you search Indian laboratories today, you will find people who can make almost anything. What we must do is make the link between that research and mass production.``

It is a link Gandhi has said is long overdue. He has slashed import duties on many high-tech imports, such as computers and circuit boards. And he has liberalized the entire socialist-based economy, attracting more than $5 billion worth of private investment in the last few months to India`s booming stock markets--most of it going into new, high-tech private corporations.